Success Factors for Motherboards in the New Year

Over the years, the Indian desktop PC motherboard market has truly evolved. Today, we see vendors coming out with a wide range of products designed for specific user segments. Customers are empowered with better choices including the Do-it-Yourself (DiY) options as well. Gaming community is also growing and so vendors need to spruce up their post-sales set up to gain competitive advantages.
– Sunil Grewal, Gigabyte Technology India

In 2015, we expect a slender growth in the overall PC market. This growth, to a great extent, will be driven by the substantially growing demand for the DiY PCs in Class C & D cities. To tap this demand, every major vendor of components is expected to renew, or rather, continue their focus on the non-metro and growing cities.

Mini ITX form factor - gaining market acceptance
Another trend that is slowly gaining momentum is that of the Mini ITX form factor devices because of the growing demand for HTPCs (Home Theatre Personal Computers) and also, SFF (Small Form Factor) PCs (due to crunching space in the Indian homes and offices). Most Mini-ITX cabinets can match the size of a shoe box, giving more desk space or legroom. The popularity of Mini-ITX form factor-based motherboards is expected to increase further, mainly because it is power-efficient.

Concerns for vendors
Indian motherboard vendors should strengthen their focus on offering products that can address and tackle the prime concerns of an average PC user. These concerns are humidity, high temperature, power failures and static electricity. Motherboards should come with technologies, which safe-guard PCs from these everyday threats faced by the Indian user. Motherboard companies should be committed to delivering quality products with not only efficiency in terms of performance and power consumption, but which are also capable of keeping PCs safe.
Users in India are increasingly preferring motherboards with HDMI and USB 3.0 ports, and SATA3, and those which support DDR3 and SSD drives. While HDMI ports are generally used for HTPCs to connect to TVs, USB 3.0 ports are becoming one of the very basic requirements for even budget motherboards because even entry-level users nowadays require faster transfer speeds.
As the end-users are becoming more discerning and tech-savvy, in 2015, we foresee the advent of more user-segment specific motherboards in the market. Vendors will come out with a wide range of models for each user category, be it gamers, overclockers, or office users.

Rise of the gaming market
Another trend that is expected to make waves in 2015
is ‘gaming’. The gaming sector per se is witnessing double digit growth in recent times. Different types of gaming, be it mobile, console or PC-based, is getting popular in India with each passing day, fuelled primarily by the consumers’ growing affinity for leisure gaming activities.
Along with casual/amateur gamers, we are also witnessing growth of a serious, passionate gaming community, which prepares judiciously for, and participates in gaming competitions in India and abroad. They are representing India in international gaming competitions as well.
In this context, we foresee a rising demand for gaming PCs, which is a good news for vendors of gaming-specific components and peripherals. PC motherboard vendors are expected to launch a lot more gaming-specific motherboards in India, than what they have been doing till now.

Need of the hour - sprucing up post-sales set-up
Vis-a-vis the expected market growth, vendors should be geared up to meet post-sales service issues and ensure service or replacement within committed turnaround time. Service centers should be equipped with the latest in repair equipment and software systems, and also be backed by skilled and experienced service engineers. Such centers should be spread out across all the regions in India, so that customers don’t have to miss out on this just because they live in a Class C or D city.

Conclusion
To sum it up, 2015 will witness a trend of an increasing tribe of matured, knowledgeable set of end-users, belonging to different segments, having different requirements and interests. The users will be willing to pay more for quality products and world-class services. Vendors have to realize and acknowledge this fact and focus on their sales, marketing and service initiatives for this small, yet fast-growing community.